The congregation had been making do with the nearby Edwardes Mission School and a small reading hall called the Anjuman in Peepal Mandi. Fundraising for a proper church building took creativity -- Lady Aitchison, wife of the Governor General of India, organized a bazaar in Simla in July 1882 to raise funds. Construction was overseen by Reverend Worthington Jukes with technical assistance from General Follard of the Royal Engineers, while a local architect handled the design under Church Missionary Society supervision. The building is cruciform in plan, its symmetry emphasized by columns, oriental arches, and minarets flanking both the facade and transepts. On St. John's Day, December 27, 1883, the doors opened for the first time. Captain Graves laid the foundation stone; his widow later presented the brass desk that still sits on the Lord's Table.

Inside, the church seats roughly 200 worshippers in an arrangement that has barely changed since the 19th century. The interior walls display scripture in six languages historically spoken in Peshawar -- English, Hebrew, Pashto, Urdu, Arabic, and Persian -- a quiet testament to the city's position at the crossroads of empires. The altar screen showcases pinjra-work, the intricate geometric wood carving for which Peshawar was once famous. A brass lectern memorializes Robert Milman, Bishop of Calcutta. Perhaps the most evocative artifact is a Bible in Hebrew and English dated 1806 whose brass latch is engraved "Peshawar City, Afghanistan" -- a relic from the era when this city served as the winter capital of the Afghan Durrani Empire, before the boundaries of nations were redrawn around it.

Behind the altar, a curved passageway leads to an ambulatory lined with white marble memorial plaques. Each one tells a story that reads like a novel. Dilawar Khan was a notorious outlaw who converted to Christianity, joined the elite Corps of Guides, and died in service in 1869. Miss Annie Norman, daughter of Sir Henry Norman, died at twenty-seven after a single year of missionary work; she remains the only European buried in the native Wazirbagh Christian cemetery. Reverend Isidor Lowenthal, a Polish Jewish convert, came to Peshawar convinced that the Pashtun people were a lost tribe of Israel and spent his life serving them. Then there were Vernon and Lilian Starr -- Vernon a martyred missionary, Lilian celebrated for riding into the lawless Tribal Areas in 1923 to rescue Molly Ellis, a kidnapped Englishwoman. These plaques document not just deaths but the collision of faiths, empires, and individual conviction on the Afghan frontier.

The service had just ended. Six hundred parishioners gathered on the front lawn for a communal lunch -- families, children, the rhythms of an ordinary Sunday. Then two suicide bombers detonated themselves in the crowd. The attack killed 127 people, including an estimated 37 children, and wounded more than 250 others. TTP Jundullah, linked to the Taliban, claimed responsibility, declaring they would "continue our attacks on non-Muslims on Pakistani land." It was the deadliest attack on Pakistan's Christian community in the country's history, and the second church attack in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in a year. The violence did not end there. On January 30, 2022, Pastor William Siraj was shot dead and Reverend Patrick Naeem fatally wounded by motorcycle-borne gunmen as they walked from the church to the attached clergy house. Bishop Azad Marshall demanded justice and government protection for Pakistani Christians.

A local legend persists, absent from official church records and missionary memoirs, that thirteen Christian workers were killed by locals while trying to fix the cross atop the dome during construction. Workers at the site still point to marks near the cross as bullet holes to substantiate the oral tradition. Whether apocryphal or not, the story captures something true about this building: it has always existed at the intersection of courage and danger. All Saints Church stands inside the Kohati Gate of Peshawar's old walled city, a place where the call to prayer mingles with church bells, where Persian calligraphy and Anglican liturgy share the same walls. It is a monument to an audacious idea -- that a church could be built to honor the culture it entered rather than erase it -- and to the terrible price that has sometimes been paid for that presence.